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 As reported April 28 in the Journal of Adolescent Health, the study
involved students at 223 U.S. universities - including more than
200,000 heterosexuals, 5,000 who are “unsure,” 15,000 who are gay,
lesbian or bisexual and 479 who are transgender.
This study is the first to include enough transgender people to make
meaningful comparisons to other gender identities, said Alexis E.
Duncan, the study’s senior author from George Warren Brown School of
Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis.
“We found that broadly speaking, cisgender" - that is, not
transgender - "heterosexual men had the lowest rates, followed by
cisgender sexual minority women, cisgender heterosexual women,
cisgender unsure and sexual minority men and women, and that trans
people had the highest rates,” she said in an email to Reuters
Health.
The students self-reported their mental health, substance use,
sexual behavior, and nutrition history on questionnaires distributed
between 2008 and 2011.
They reported whether or not they had been diagnosed or treated by a
professional for anorexia or bulimia within the previous year, and
if they had vomited, taken laxatives or diet pills over the past
month.
The researchers compared various gender identity and sexual
orientation groups with cisgender heterosexual women, who are
usually the focus of eating disorder literature.
About 1.5% of the students said they were diagnosed with an eating
disorder during the previous year. Almost 3% had vomited or used
laxatives and more than 3% had used diet pills during the previous
month.
These reports were all most common among transgender students and
least common among cisgender heterosexual male students, the
researchers found.
Compared to cisgender heterosexual women, cisgender lesbian or
bisexual women were less likely to report a past-year eating
disorder. But cisgender unsure women and men and cisgender gay or
bisexual men were more likely to report a diagnosis.
Transgender students were more than four times as likely to report
an eating disorder diagnosis as cisgender heterosexual women.
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Transgender students were also twice as likely to report using diet
pills and more than twice as likely to report vomiting or using
laxatives during the previous month.
The new study mirrors many of the findings from past research but
includes more participants and compares transgender and cisgender
people, said Monica Algars of Abo Akademi University in Turku,
Finland.
In a previous study, Algars found that transgender people may strive
for thinness as an attempt to suppress features of their birth
gender, or accentuate features of their self-identified gender, she
told Reuters Health by email.
“Other potential explanations include minority stress due to stigma
and discrimination,” said Algars, who wasn’t part of the new study.
She cautioned that eating disorders were evaluated in this study
based on only a handful of questions. Also, it’s possible the
increased diagnoses among transgender people result from more
contact with mental health professionals.
It is important to recognize how eating disorders can be related to
gender dysphoria and body dissatisfaction among transgender people,
Algars said.
“On a more positive note, many transgender people report that gender
reassignment treatment can alleviate body dissatisfaction and eating
(disorders),” she said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1bBapM9
J Adolesc Health 2015.
[© 2015 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2015 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
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